Chapter LXXXI: The Right Idea of Married Life

MANY have an overstrained and false view of matrimony, which leads to great unhappiness afterwards. They are of a fanciful disposition, fond of building castles in the air, and overlooking the realities of life.

Besides, they have heard many highly-wrought stories and legends of princes and princesses, of lords and ladies, of village girls and their admirers, who were dying of love to one another. The lovers are, of course, perfection itself. The young man is tall and handsome; the young woman fair and beautiful. He is noble and generous; she has every amiable quality of woman. In short, two such mortals could not be found anywhere else in the whole world.

They go through all sorts of trials for one another. He is ready to die a dozen times for her sake, and she is ready to make away with herself quite as often when the course of true love does not run smooth. After a wonderful series of ups and downs, and astonishing surprises, all comes out right; they get married, and that is the last we hear of them.

This is the stuff we get in novels and romances, and it has turned many a poor girl’s head and ruined her happiness. Novels represent marriage as the end of our existence. It is not so. God is the object and end of our existence. Novels represent a husband as in the place of God to us. It is not so. The love of a husband cannot fill the heart. It is only God’s love that can do that.

If you place your supreme good and happiness in the love of your husband, you will be sure to be disappointed. Trouble and anxiety will be mixed with it, and death will be likely to knock your idol to pieces.

If you imagine you are going to live like two angels together, seeing only perfection in one another, and admiring all you see, I rather think you will be mistaken. Lovers are blind; they hide their faults and show only their amiable qualities; they are not willing to see faults when they are only too plain, but by and by there will be plenty of time to find out the truth and no motive for concealment.

He comes to see you in his Sunday’s best, his shoes shining and his hair brushed and oiled; by and by his face will look dirty and coarse, his hair all disorder, his clothes begrimed with dirt.

He talks soft and delicate now; by and by you will hear harsh sounds out of his mouth. “Why haven’t you done this?” “Why don’t you do better?” and perhaps things a great deal worse.

He was ready to die for you awhile ago, but you find he lives a great deal more for himself than for you. You find him cross and disagreeable, lazy, perhaps, and shiftless, selfish and dissipated, provoking and inconsiderate; in short, you discover many things which you did not dream of before.

And I dare say you will show many traits of character which he did not see before, and which will require a good deal of forbearance to put up with.

People who form great expectations are apt to get disappointed; and the higher one’s hopes the more cruel the disappointment. Young people whose ideas of marriage are of the fanciful kind, gotten out of novels, who imagine that married life is a perpetual courtship or honeymoon, that love is going to prevent all that is disagreeable, that love will supply bread and butter, keep the children from crying, or the weather pleasant, or get the dinner, or make the beds, will sometimes find themselves cruelly undeceived.

Their ideas are false and they cannot be realized. Now comes the danger. They give way to the disappointment. They begin to hate where they thought they loved. Bickering and dissension set in. After awhile they live pretty much like cats and dogs, and there is no remedy but a separation — a miserable remedy, which is directly in the face of the solemn promise they made to God to take each other for better or worse.

If they had looked at the matter in its true light, there would have been no disappointment. Their chief happiness would not have been placed in one another, but higher, in God our only True Good. They would have had something to fall back upon in case of disappointment.

They would have expected many and great faults of character in one another, to be borne patiently and put up with, and have been prepared for the worst.

When a couple love one another in God and for God — which is the only real true love worth having — God’s grace is sufficient for them. All looks different. They learn to respect one another, to make each other happy, and increase in love every day.

Look at marriage, then, in this light. Put away fancy and look at the reality, and pray God to give you His true light, to see things as they are, and for grace to act accordingly.